Quote

There isn't a king or a merchant prince in the whole world that I envy, for I always knew I was born to be a child of destiny and that I was never meant to wring my living from detestable, low, degrading, mean and ordinary kinds of business.

John Cheever

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John Cheever
Age: 70 †
Born: 1912
Born: May 27
Died: 1982
Died: June 18
Diarist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Quincy
Massachusetts
John William Cheever
Kind
Knew
Envy
Always
Child
Lows
Never
Born
King
Wring
World
Living
Kinds
Detestable
Business
Meant
Merchant
Whole
Kings
Degrading
Children
Destiny
Merchants
Mean
Ordinary
Prince

More quotes by John Cheever

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Wisdom we know is the knowledge of good and evil - not the strength to choose between the two.
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Only the opium eater truly understands the pain of death.
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I dream that my face appears on a postage stamp.
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That's the way I remember them, heading for an exit.
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It is not, as somebody once wrote, the smell of corn bread that calls us back from death it is the lights and signs of love and friendship.
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I love you not for the person you are, but for your possibilities.
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Literature has been the salvation of the damned, literature has inspired and guided lovers, routed despair and can perhaps in this case save the world.
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Then it is dark it is a night where kings in golden suits ride elephants over the mountains.
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Novels are about men and women and children and dogs, not politics.
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For these are not as they might seem to be, the ruins of our civilization, but are temporary encampment and outposts of the civilization that we - you and I - shall build.
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The writer cultivates, extends, raises and inflates his imagination, sure that this is his destiny, his usefulness, his contribution to the understanding of good and evil. As he inflates his imagination he inflates his capacity for evil.
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I was here on earth because I chose to be.
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Homesickness is nothing. Fifty percent of the people in the world are homesick all the time.
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Fiction is experimentation when it ceases to be that, it ceases to be fiction.
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Falsehood is a critical element in fiction. Part of the thrill of being told a story is the chance of being hoodwinked. . .The telling of lies is a sort of sleight of hand that displays our deepest feelings about life.
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Love with its paraphernalia of sexuality, jealousy, nostalgia and exaltation was easier to reognize than friendship, which seemed to have (excepting athletic equipment) no paraphernalia at all.
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The world that was not mine yesterday now lies spread out at my feet, a splendor. I seem, in the middle of the night, to have returned to the world of apples, the orchards of Heaven. Perhaps I should take my problems to a shrink, or perhaps I should enjoy the apples that I have, streaked with color like the evening sky.
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Art is the triumph over chaos.
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The short story is the literature of the nomad.
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A collection of short stories is generally thought to be a horrendous clinker an enforced courtesy for the elderly writer who wants to display the trophies of his youth, along with his trout flies.
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